


Just a Bug in the System

by Just_here_for_a_laugh



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Virus, Awkward Doctor (Doctor Who), Banter, Domestic, F/M, Fluff, Life in the TARDIS, Mentions of Kissing, One Shot, Pining, Rose is sick, Set Whenever You Want, Sickfic, Slice of Life, Snuggling, Tenth Doctor Era, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler Fluff, This is just fluff my dudes, Worried Doctor (Doctor Who), awkward tenth doctor, enjoy, made up planet names, made up technobabble, mentions of timelord biology, nervous doctor, not overwhelmingly though she's sick, references to offscreen adventures, sassy Rose Tyler, she's fine, the Doctor is smitten, the Tardis is malfunctioning, the doctor has a respiratory bypass system, the doctor is an actual doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23231710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_here_for_a_laugh/pseuds/Just_here_for_a_laugh
Summary: The Doctor is trying to concentrate on a malfunctioning sensor but with each of Rose's coughs he gets more and more worried and less and less focused. Cue ridiculously in-depth questioning and awkward conversation to figure out whats wrong, along with some serious pining
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 73





	Just a Bug in the System

He was worried. He was worried because this screen was not working right at all, well, maybe not ‘not at all’ but not how he wanted it to at least. This was the third warning it had shown about the trilium oscillator reaching critical heat levels, but he had his hand right on it and could tell that it was not, in fact, overheating. And to top it all off the warning was written in Twi. The Doctor didn’t have anything against Twi in most circumstances but here it gave him pause since the screen was very much not programed for Twi but Gallifreyan. He was worried because it was not often that both his mallet and his mind failed him, but no amount of percussive maintenance had worked and he could not figure out why this was happening. Mostly though, he was worried about what had been keeping him distracted from troubleshooting the circuits. He tried to focus on what he was doing, but the coughing was reverberating through the Tardis made it nearly impossible. Drilling his eyes onto the wires, the Doctor gave one last ditch effort to concentrate before realizing that he was more focused on focussing than the task at hand. Sighing, he looked up and gently touched the upper control panel. 

“What’s wrong Old Girl?” he asked with eyes soft and concerned and as old as the Tardis herself. As Rose walked in behind him, coughing again, the Doctor finally took his eyes from the blinking lights of the central controls and to the restless blonde. She was evidently looking for something but her pauses to clear her throat or hack up her lungs were slowing her down considerably. The Doctor was very nearly distraught; both his girls were sick and he had no idea why. Seemingly giving up her search, Rose moved over to stand by the Doctor.

“How’s she lookin?” she asked as she came down off of another short fit.

“Mm, not good,” the Doctor admitted, looking the consol up and down. “The screen keeps reading that the trilium oscillator is overheating but I checked it and it’s fine! And this is my good hand too, fresh and brand new, just right for feeling slight variations in temperature.” Rose made a lazy attempt to control a grin.

“You know, that hand is only twelve hours newer than the other one. It doesn’t have super powers or anything.”

“Twelve hours is a long time Rose, twelve hours is ages! And you don’t know, it could. This could be the most super hand in all the universe.” Rose laughed,

“Well then Superman, what’s wrong with the...whatever?”

“Trilium oscillator”

“And what does that do?”

“It oscillates the trilium.”

“Right, of course,” Rose rolled her eyes playfully, “how stupid of me not to guess that one.” The Doctor smiled, but it fell as Rose started to cough again.

“The problem isn’t with the oscillator it’s with the screen,” the Doctor explained as he reached out and helped Rose to a chair, “It’s giving faulty readings and it’s giving them in Twi, but at the moment it can wait. You seem to be in much greater need of attention.” Rose waived him off and tried to stand up.

“I’m fine. It’s just -” she was cut off by another coughing fit. The Doctor grabbed her arms and eased her back down.

“Mhm, you sound fine. What’s wrong?” Rose rolled her eyes and looked up at the uneasy expression on the face that was probably a bit too close, and she couldn’t help but smile slightly to herself. 

“I’ve just got a cough, it’s no big deal. I’ve had it since I woke up. It’ll go away soon. Nothing major, just a bug, probably a cold or something. I used to get them all the time when I was a kid.”

The Doctor couldn’t help but let fear creep up in his thoughts. He leaned back crossing his arms and Rose knew that they were going to be here a while.

“Maybe,” he started and she settled back into the chair, “but you didn’t encounter alien viruses and bacteria when you were a kid. I want to figure out what this is, and make sure that it really is just a simple cold.” He turned around to grab what Rose assumed would be some sort of high tech scanner or the sonic screwdriver, but instead he turned around with a notepad and a pen. 

“What, no specs to run?” she teased him.

“Nope, just some good old fashioned questions. What time did you get up this morning?”

“What, seriously?” She asked. “You’re not gonna scan me with the sonic screwdriver and analyze the data?”

“I already did that when I first heard you coughing, but it didn’t turn anything up.”

“So I’m fine.”

“So you have something that the sonic didn’t detect. But it’s a screwdriver, I’m a doctor. I can figure this out.” Rose paused.

“I know that you know, basically most things,” she started, “not as much as you think you do,” she added quickly as he started to smile, “but a lot, but do you like actually have a medical degree?” Rose asked, sort of wondering why she had never asked before.

“From three different planets.” The Doctor told her with no small amount of pride.

“Right, and are any of them to treat humans?” She asked, tongue firmly in her cheek. The Doctor huffed and rolled his head down onto his hand. He leaned further back against the control center and smiled.

“Not technically, but I think I can figure it out. Now, when did you wake up?”

“I think it was around 9am Tardis time.”

“Okay,” he nodded, “and you said you noticed it then?” Rose nodded her response and he noted something down. “Any other symptoms? Headache, dizziness, numbness of the left phillanges?”

“No,” Rose laughed, “just the cough.” 

“Hmm, okay what about last night? Were you extra thirsty, did you have any strange dreams? Maybe wake up in the middle of the night somewhere you didn’t expect to be?”

“Nope, we finished our game, I went to bed, dreamed about how you totally won by cheating, and woke up in my bed this morning.”  
“I did not cheat!” He gasped with a grin, “I used my resources!”

“You only knew the answer because you were there! How was anyone supposed to know a secret verdict of the Andosian Supreme Court? That’s so not fair Doctor.” 

“That’s not cheating that’s education. Lovely trial by the way, the Andosian legal proceedings are really quite fascinating, though I could have done without the outdoor arena and the loudspeakers. My ears rang for a month after those proceedings ended. Well, they didn’t so much end as halt. You see first the court decides its secret verdict and once I heard that I knew that I had to get out of there so I booked it out of town as fast as I could and I had to hitchhike back to the Tardis on an Andosian camel. I wasn’t even in the desert!”

“How did you hear the secret verdict?” Rose asked.

“I was in the wall that ran along the deliberation room.”  
“Oh,” Rose said, crossing her arms with a smug grin smile, “So you didn’t cheat the game, you cheated the Andosian justice system.”

“Well-,” the Doctor laughed, “when you put it like that-” He was cut off by another bout of Rose’s coughing. “When you put it like that it sounds like we should get back to solving your cough. Now, have you eaten anything unusual lately?” Rose let out an amused snort,

“Isn’t everything on an alien planet unusual?” The two sat there for what seemed to Rose like ages as the Doctor asked her every possible question he could think of to try to get to the bottom of her illness. They covered her whole routine for the past few weeks from hygiene to bookshelf organization, and Rose was starting to think that this just might be more annoying than the cough itself. “Doctor, look! We’ve been over everything and we are getting nowhere! And I don’t even know why you need to ask me all these things; we’re together all the time anyway. You and I spend all day side by side, so you know I haven’t been gardening poisonous plants or getting cut up in a sword fight!”

“You have been in a sword fight before,” the Doctor quietly reminded her.

“Not in the past few weeks!” She exclaimed. The raise in her voice made her start coughing again and the Doctor looked down dejected. When she caught her breath again, Rose shook her head. “I’m sorry, I appreciate that you care so much, but there is thorough and there is overkill.” She smiled softly at him as he lifted his eyes just enough to look through his hair, and she could see the smile in them that the rest of his face was blocking from view. Finally looking up fully he said,

“I know, and you’re right. But you aren’t always with me. You wander off, and that’s usually when you find the people who need saving, but as great as that is that’s also when you tend to wind up in danger, and it means I don’t always know what you’re doing.” Rose knew that was true, and so she reconsidered cutting the interrogation short. Nodding, she noticed the Doctor’s face become slightly worried and she watched as he brought his hand up to scratch the back of his neck like he so often did when he felt awkward. After a second he spoke, saying “Which, brings me to the next part. I’ve got to ask you some, um, personal questions.” Rose raised one eyebrow,

“Personal questions?” What did he think he’d been asking before? “More personal than my dreams and what I wash first in the shower?” She chuckled, but she immediately saw that the Doctor was not. He was looking anywhere but at her and she could have sworn she saw him flush slightly. She settled down and shifted her weight a little to try and ease the tension she felt. “Okay,” she started, “go ahead.”

“Um, okay,” the Doctor forced out awkwardly, “Have you...spent time alone with anyone recently for any extended amount of time?” Rose thought about this for a second, reflecting on the past few weeks and their many adventures.

“Besides you?” she asked. The Doctor chuckled nervously,

“Yeah, besides me.” Rose thought about the young girl Aelia she had helped trying to find her parents, only to find a goblin instead. Then, after she and the Doctor had outwitted the creature and the girl and countless others were with their families again, Aelia’s mother had taken her aside to thank her for saving her daughter and their town. Over the past few weeks there had been a couple of instances like that one, so she thought she ought to consider them in this question.

“I guess I have,” Rose said slowly, “yeah I’m gonna have to say yes.” 

“Okay,” the Doctor breathed, “during this time did you come into close physical contact with them?” Again, Rose thought about Aelia and her family’s hugs, and about how she had fallen onto a man in the market the week before when a poultry cart brushed by her unexpectedly and a little too fast. 

“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” came Rose’s answer. The Doctor managed a noise of acknowledgement as he looked down at his notepad to try and focus his attention on a single spot. He was about as successful as he had been focusing on the screen, though this time it was not Rose’s cough that was keeping him from concentrating, it was his own thoughts. His reason for concentrating on the thing in front of him was different now too. He had an idea of how she could have gotten sick, which is what had started this last line of questioning, but he didn’t want to ask the final question. He didn’t want to know the answer. He didn’t want to be right. 

He pulled his tongue from where it was stuck to the roof of his mouth and tried to ignore his hearts racing. “When you, um when you were in contact with these people for an extended period of time,” he took an imperceptible breath and pushed through the question to get it over with, “did you kiss any of them?” He could feel the blush on his cheeks and desperately hoped that she couldn’t see it. All he could do was rapidly play back in his head the upturn in his voice on the word kiss far more times than seemed possible in the second that it took her to answer, but he knew better than anyone that time was relative.   
“No.”

His body wanted to let out a sigh of relief, but he couldn’t. Even his Gallifreyan respiratory bypass system seemed to be failing him, a fact that he was immensely grateful for because a sigh would be far too obvious a sign to risk Rose seeing. Still, as he tried to maintain a cool and pensive looking exterior, internally he smiled. 

However, as privately happy as this news made him, it did mean that he was now out of possible answers for what was making Rose sick. He sat thinking for a moment before he finally admitted that he had no idea what this was or how she got it. 

“If you didn’t get it airborne from the environment and you didn’t get it from intimate contact, I have no idea what happend. I don’t what it could be.”

“Wait a second,” Rose interjected, “What if it’s both?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are there any sicknesses you know of that are transmitted through direct, concentrated, yet airborne means? Like from that oxygen mask I wore on Salbrus?” The Doctor’s hands flew to his hair.

“Of course! The Alcatron Flu!” He jumped up onto a footstool behind him, startling Rose. “It presents very similarly to Earth’s common cold and it used to be called the Breath of Life Disease because it was transmitted by mouth to mouth resuscitation. The virus is technically airborne but it can only live in an argon atmosphere for a few seconds so it doesn’t usually get transmitted unless someone who’s sick breathes directly into your lungs. However the virus itself is small enough to pass through the filter of a lower quality oxygen tank! That’s it!”

“And that would explain why you aren’t sick since you didn’t need the mask.” Rose added. Once again he was thankful for his respiratory bypass system, although for an entirely different reason this time. Rose smiled, “I guess you are a doctor after all, Doctor.” He smiled and perked up a little with pride which made her laugh, and then cough again. Even with the rough catches and ragged exhalations, her laugh still reminded him of bells. Keeping in his duties as a medical doctor, the Doctor prescribed his cure for the Breath of Life Disease: rest. He brought his softest blanket to her and sent her off to bed.

“You go back to sleep and I’ll fix this screen.” She took the blanket and puffed out her bottom lip. The Doctor laughed softly at the pout and drew her into a hug. “You need rest, Rose.” He told her as he gently swayed them back and forth, moving with the hum of the Tardis. Leaning back to face her he said “After I’m done with this I’ll come bring you some food and we can watch a movie, so long as you stay in bed and don’t get up. Deal?” Rose smiled,

“Deal.” She agreed in a small voice that radiated comfort and trust. She wrapped the blanket around herself to go, but first she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Then she turned around and softly padded away under her big fluffy blanket. 

As he watched her turn the corner, he brought his hand up to his cheek and smiled. He could still feel her kiss on his skin, not exactly warm and not exactly soft, but still entirely lovely. The only word that he could come up with for the sensation was bright, like having one of the stars he loved so much just barely touch his cheek. As he turned back to the faulty Tardis screen, he once again found it hard to concentrate. This time however, it wasn’t concern or fear keeping his thoughts from the circuits and fixed on Rose, it was a feeling much more complex, much more powerful, and much more fantastic. 

That night as the credits of the movie rolled and he sat with his back against Rose’s headboard and his arm over her as she slept against his chest, he marvelled at how peaceful she looked and at how peaceful he felt. His final thought as he drifted off to sleep was the thought that always began one of his calm and restful dreams; a thought of light. The light which sparkled in a way that could only mean serenity and most importantly a sense of home. It was the light which had always comforted him, and that had shone on the silver leaves of Gallifrey. Though, lately, he had noticed it had begun to take on the glint of something a little more golden. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this old fic I dug up from my files, I thought it was cute so I decided to share :) I don't own Doctor Who or anything associated with it. Happy reading!


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